Press Review
"History has been written in Prague" reads the headline in Friday's LIDOVE NOVINY summing up the situation after Day One of the NATO Summit being held in the Czech Republic: on Thursday NATO officials invited seven new countries to join the alliance and all of the dailies carry extensive coverage of the event. All show cover photographs of beaming world leaders including Jacques Chirac, Vaclav Havel, and George W. Bush. Only PRAVO features a photo of demonstrators on its cover instead.
"History has been written in Prague" reads the headline in Friday's LIDOVE NOVINY summing up the situation after Day One of the NATO Summit being held in the Czech Republic: on Thursday NATO officials invited seven new countries to join the alliance and all of the dailies carry extensive coverage of the event. All show cover photographs of beaming world leaders including Jacques Chirac, Vaclav Havel, and George W. Bush. Only PRAVO features a photo of demonstrators on its cover instead.
But demonstrations fizzled on Thursday, with a far lower turn-out than anyone had expected: there was no repeat of the violence and police clashes that marred the World Bank/ IMF meeting in Prague two years ago. Demonstrators numbered a few hundred in the end - a far cry from the twelve thousand that the Interior Ministry had warned would arrive to protest, which had many Prague businesses boarding up their shops in advance. After years of planning and hundreds of millions of crowns spent on security by the Czech Republic - the protests turned-out to be a lop-sided affair, and the paper writes: police almost had more work directing traffic.
HOSPODARSKE NOVINY points out that so far no one has really been able to explain why estimates on the demonstrators were so far off the mark. The Interior Ministry is insisting it made no mistake, that it based its estimates on international sources and information gathered by the Czech secret service, as well as drawing on recent experience with anti-globalisation protests in Florence and Genoa.
The Interior Ministry denies over-blowing the numbers on purpose, though the organisers of some anarchist demonstrations contend they always insisted no more than 3,000 protestors would arrive.
And in a last note on Thursday's demonstrations MLADA FRONTA DNES writes - with a generous dash of sarcasm - about the end of the anarchist movement in Bohemia. The paper cites protestors on Thursday complaining that demonstrations were poorly organised, that it wasn't clear who was in charge. Evidence of a sad fate the paper suggests: anarchists calling for order.
Now, LIDOVE NOVINY brings some order to the various protest movements currently in the Czech Republic, in a kind of Who's Who of organisers in its weekend supplement. The paper profiles several local protest leaders, including the figure Jiri W. Krovinek, an anarchist activist who conceals his true identity behind a rubber imitation mask of former prime minister Vaclav Klaus.
Krovinek, whose pseudonym, by the way, is the Czech translation of George W. Bush, says he is against NATO because, in his words, the organisation "sanctions wars for political-economic gain". Asked what he does for a living he reveals he is construction engineer, stressing he earns so little money he is reminded daily of so-called "capitalist oppression".
Finally, PRAVO writes about a bizarre incident on Thursday, during which a 35-year-old Czech man attempted to jump off of Prague's Nusle bridge, before being apprehended by police. The paradox is that the bridge is part of one of the most heavily-guarded zones for the NATO summit. The paper quotes an ambulance crew member who said he almost didn't believe the call was real. Police later revealed the would-be suicide never actually made it past the heavily-guarded barricades, only to an earlier section of the bridge.
